Miscalculating

Ex- CIA Chief: Why We Keep Getting Putin Wrong

Blame a myopic mindset—and an intelligence corps focused on terrorism, not Moscow.

The
last time Russian troops invaded one of its neighbors, the U.S. intelligence
community was also caught off guard.

The year was 2008 and the country was Georgia instead of the Ukraine. And just as in 2014, back then there were early signs that Moscow was serious—it was issuing visas to ethnic Russian speakers in Georgia, like it's doing now in Ukraine. U.S. analysts just didn’t believe Russia would go as far as it did.

Today, as in 2008, American policy makers have found themselves burned
after trying to make Vladimir Putina partner when Putin himself sees
America as a rival. This has often led Republican and Democratic led
administrations to find themselves flat footed in the face of Russian
aggression and U.S. intelligence analysts racing to explain how they misread
Putin’s motivations.

“This is less a question of how many collection resources we
throw at Russia and more broadly about the analytic challenge of understanding
Putin’s mind set,” said Michael Hayden, a former CIA director and NSA director
under President George W. Bush. “Here our Secretary of State is saying this is
not the Cold War, it’s win-win and it’s not zero sum. But for Vladimir Putin it
is zero sum. That’s what we need to understand.”

Of course, U.S.-Russian relations have overlapped in some
areas of mutual interest. The two countries have worked to maintain the International
Space Station, with Russian Soyuz capsules bringing American astronauts into
orbit. Both countries have cooperated, at times, on sanctioning Iran for its
nuclear program. And both sides agreed to an ambitious plan in Syria to
dismantle the regime's chemical weapons arsenal.

But when it comes to the status of the newly independent nations
that used to comprise the Soviet empire, the United States and Russia have been
at odds.

“Our Secretary of State is saying this is not the Cold War, it’s win-win and it’s not zero sum. But for Vladimir Putin it is zero sum. That’s what we need to understand.”

Late last week, for example, U.S. intelligence analysts and
lawmakers estimated that the Russian forces massing near Ukraine's border
wouldn't openly invade.Sen.
Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on
Thursday that he didn't know
Putin's motivations, but was sure Russia wouldn't invade Ukraine: "I can’t
believe they are foolish enough to do that."

There wasn't an open pouring of troops over the border. But
Russian mercenaries and other
troops wound up seizing power in the Ukrainian province of Crimea anyway. On Sunday,
Secretary of State John Kerry called the move an “invasion.”

Hayden compared the problem with understanding Putin to the
problem of the Arab Spring, the democratic upheavals in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya
and other countries in the Arab world that was also entirely missed by the U.S.
intelligence community. “That was not a secret to be stolen,” Hayden said.
“That was something that required a broader understanding of the problem. This
is the challenge to understanding Putin’s mindset.”

Damon Wilson, who in 2008 was the National Security Council’s
senior director for Europe and the lead manager at the George W. Bush White House
for the Georgia crisis, was blunt in his assessment of the warnings before Russia’s
invasion that summer. “Our analysts missed it on Georgia,” he said.

Wilson, who is now the executive vice president of the
Atlantic Council, also said an important reason was that the U.S. government
has failed to understand that Putin does not see America as a friend or a
partner.

“We get used to outrageous Russian behavior and we come to accept
that as normal and we end up tolerating it,” Wilson said. “We had plenty of
warnings in 2008 that Russia would provoke a confrontation with Georgia and end
up invading, but we still didn’t think he’d actually do it.” Those warnings
included many of the same kinds of things the world was seeing in the run up to
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, such as the distribution of passports to ethnic
Russians and statements about Moscow’s interests within its “near abroad” or
those former Soviet Republics that largely gained independence in 1991 after
the break up of the communist empire.

Wilson said there were three reasons why the U.S. government was
unprepared for Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008. To start, he said, much of
the hardware the U.S. government uses to spy—the satellites, sensors, blimps and
sophisticated intercept technology—were focused in 2008 (as they are in 2014)
on counter-terrorism and proliferation targets like Pakistan, Afghanistan and
Iran. “We have enormous assets that for a long time were focused much more on
Afghanistan and Iraq and not really on the Caucuses or Russia’s near abroad,” Wilson
said.

For the last 13 years, the way you got ahead in America's intelligence services was to specialize in stopping terrorists. Compared to al-Qaeda, the Russians were seen as has-beena – albeit nuclear-armed has-beens. Spying on Moscow was considered a second-tier priority. Sure, the Russian intelligence agencies were (and are) one of the world's most sophisticated; competing against the sons of the KGB was one of the toughest challenges for an American operative or analyst. But the stakes just weren't that high. It was like having a chess match against your grandfather, while everyone else played CallofDuty for money.

"Clearly Russia is not the collection priority that the Soviet
Union used to be. Lots of resources are pulled off into terrorism and proliferation,"
said Hayden, who has said for years that America's spy corps was over-focused on
the terrorist threat.

Moscow has always been a notoriously difficult target for
espionage and intelligence collection—while
American policy makers have a number of channels for talking to the leadership
of Western-friendly
regimes in
Russia’s near abroad. In 2008, for example, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili
had regular conversations with U.S. political elites in the run up to the
Russian invasion, the United States had far less visibility into Russian
decision making. If anything, the problem has gotten worse since then. The
rise of biometrically-enabled passports and the
growth of digital data trails has made it harder for American operatives and analysts,
whose cover is often blown after a single trip to Russia.

But the biggest problem, according to Wilson, was a failure
to absorb that Putin does not assess his own interests in the way Americans
believe that he should.

A veteran intelligence analyst with the United States military,
noted that younger colleagues had been confident that "Putin wouldn't do anything"
in the current crisis. Then came the stealth invasion of Crimea. “How extraordinary
it is that the conventional wisdom and self-licking ice-cream cone is alive and
well,” this analyst said. "Why anyone should be surprised is what is
surprising. We are believing our own spin that the world has changed. Not in
the Russia”n government, it hasn't.

An American intelligence operative with long experience in the
Ukraine added, "Most likely, force is the only thing that will resolve this
matter, even if some people think an angry [U.S. ambassador to the United Nations]
Samantha Power is enough to make Putin rethink his desire to secure Russian interests."

John Schindler, a former counter-intelligence officer at the
NSA and an analyst of Russian statecraft, said that many
in the
intelligence community favor a “rational actor/social
science” model of analysis that winds up confirming a lot of American biases
about how leaders ought to behave. But real life is messier. And there's more than
one way to be rational.

The problem historically has been U.S. intelligence analysts have lunged between alternating models to predict Russian statecraft. Either Moscow was implacably belligerent or shared the same rational interests as the United States.

“It was not rational, so to speak, for Putin to go in this
heavy handed into Crimea,” Schindler said. “The Kremlin could have gotten
control of Crimea with much less direct and less risky methods, but they went
for the most politically risky model possible.”

Schindler said this has been a puzzle for the U.S.
intelligence community since the days of the cold war. In the
1950s, the spooks swore that the Russians were building many more intercontinental
ballistic missiles than the U.S.; it just wasn't so. In the mid-80s, top Kremlinologist
(and future CIA director and Defense Secretary) Robert Gates famously argued
that Mikhail Gorbachev was just another leader “cut from the old Soviet
mold.” Instead,
he wound up being the midwife for the Soviet Union's demise.

In 1962 for example, President Kennedy’s director of central intelligence,
John McCone, asked the CIA’s analysts to conduct a special national
intelligence estimate on whether the USSR was placing missiles in Cuba. The
analysts concluded that there was a body of evidence that suggested this was
indeed what was happening, but concluded “the Kremlin was a rational actor and
this would be a profoundly irrational act and there is no way the Soviets would
do such a thing,” Schindler said. “Fortunately McCone called bullshit and asked
for another assessment and that was the famous assessment that concluded yes
the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba.”

In 2008, the United States ending up sending Georgia humanitarian aid on military aircraft as its territory was invaded. Russian troops remain on Georgian territory to this day and Moscow faced no real consequences.

Hayden observed that Putin “did not spend much time in the
penalty box for invading Georgia. That happens in August, then there is an
election, then there is a new administration and in a few months you have the
reset.” That reset in relations began in 2009 when Obama came into power. The
two sides explored ways of cooperating instead of focusing on their divisions
when it came to Georgia.

And in some ways it worked for a while. Russia and the United
States signed a treaty in 2010 to reduce the strategic nuclear arsenals for
both sides. Russia backed off threats to kick the United States out of
important airbases in Kyrgyzstan the U.S. military needed to resupply forces in
Afghanistan. But Russia continued to flex its muscles nonetheless in Syria and
now in Ukraine.

Not all senior officials underestimated Putin. In 2010, then
Defense Secretary Gates was quoted in one diplomatic cable disclosed by Wikileaks
as saying Russia was an "oligarchy run by the security services." But
Gates was largely an exception.

On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry
promised that the United States was considering a swath of options to punish
Putin’s behavior in Ukraine beyond simply boycotting the upcoming G8 summit in
Sochi. When he was asked on NBC’s Meet the Press about the “reset,” Kerry said
that policy was from long ago. “We’ve
entered into a different phase with Russia,” Kerry said. From Putin’s
perspective however we’ve been in this different phase for years.